South Asia

The Summer 2013 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This edition highlights the Belfer Center’s expanding work on complex cybersecurity issues and Middle East challenges, offers reflections on the role of the U.S. in Iraq, and spotlights work being done by the Center and its affiliates on environment and energy issues.

As a child, Aisha Ahmad remembers vividly the arms bazaars in Peshawar and the throngs of bearded mujahedeen commanders as they passed through her grandfather’s smoke laden offices in the Pakistani frontier province.Though she was born in the UK and grew up in Canada, her family retained strong ties with their native community and during her youth Ahmad regularly traveled to the unruly Pakistan-Afghanistan border region.

More than 250 people joined experts from around the world in April for “Revolution & Reform: The Historic Transition in the Middle East,” a conference sponsored by the Belfer Center’s Dubai Initiative (DI). Leading scholars assessed the political, economic, and legal aspects of the turmoil engulfing the region this spring.

The Belfer Center's Graham Allison, Nicholas Burns, Ashraf Hegazy, Joseph S. Nye, and Stephen Walt consider the U.S.'s shifting foreign policy in the Middle East.

Rory Stewart is the Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and  director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a member of the Belfer Center Board of Directors. A former  officer in the British Army and deputy governate coordinator with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Stewart spent two years walking 6,000 miles across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal - a journey he describes in his critically acclaimed book  The Places in Between.

An intensive three-day conference hosted y the Belfer Center's Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution focused on the challenges and opportunities of state building in Afghanistan. Participants agreed that effective reconstruction of Afghanistan depends on strengthening security, reducing poppy production, decreasing the hold of narcoterrorists, improving regional commercial linkages, enhancing a sense of nationhood, and bolstering good governance.